


memento mori

by mermaidism



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Family Dynamics, Friendship, Gen, Handmaidens, Planet Naboo (Star Wars), Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2018-06-10 16:43:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 20,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6964909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermaidism/pseuds/mermaidism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"last night i washed the queen's feet, and put the gold in her hair, and the only reward i find for this, is the gallows to be my share"<br/>-the ballad of mary hamilton</p><p>the handmaidens look back on queen amidala, and each other, what they have lost, and what they have gained</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eirtaé

Once there were many of us.

My father wanted me to be Queen. I suppose I must have wanted it too. It is hard to know for sure, now. After what has happened. After what is left. It is hard to put it into words—like trying to catch the lakewater in your hands. When you close your fist, its cool wetness is nothing more than memory. But I must try. For my newborn granddaughter, I must try.  
My father wanted me to be Queen, but Naboo did not. Instead they chose a tiny slip of a girl from a family even older and more wealthy than my own. As some sort of symbolic gesture, I was offered a place as one of the new Queen’s handmaidens. I wanted to say no, but my father answered first.  
_Yes. She accepts. It will be a privilege to have a Silva at the side of our new Queen. You do my family a very great honor, Captain Panaka._  
Of course it was my family’s name—my great-grandmother’s legacy—that provided me with the invitation at all. After all, my hair was pale as the morning sun reflecting off the still, blue waters of Lake Varykino, and the new Queen had long braids of dark brown.

When I came to Theed, for the first time in my life, I could not smell the rotten sweetness of water. I wondered if my great-grandmother had missed it as well. When she sat on the throne wearing the Scar of Remembrance, did her thoughts turn to the Lake Country where she could walk down the stairs of our palazzo into the green-blue of Lake Varykino?  
It was impossible to tell for sure what this new Queen was thinking on her own throne.  
_She is so young_ , I thought as I bowed deeply as my father had taught me. I counted to five in my head before I stood to face her once more. _So young, and so solemn_.  
_You are the Silva daughter_ , she said to me. Her voice was deep and strong. Her eyes were cool and distant. One would never know that in summers, I had seen this girl-queen laughing with her family and diving like a Gungun into the lake at the palazzo across from my own. Everyone knows queens may not smile. The Scar of Remembrance does not allow such frivolities. I knew enough to play along.  
_I am, my Queen. I am Eirtaé. I am to be your handmaid._

And so her handmaid I became.

What can I say of the time I spent with her? Nothing, but that it was too short. Shorter even than it should have been, for I spent much time in quiet jealousy that she was, in the end, the wiser, braver, better girl. I always stood out, even while cloaked and hooded. I was so tall and so fair, a Sando aqua monster in a school of Faa fish. I tried to stay away from the other girls, but in the end, after the Invasion, I found myself with friends. You don’t fight and die for a girl you don’t love. And we all loved her. When she stood there in that filmy white gown, wearing the Scar and the twin spots of Balance and Symmetry that we had painted on her small face, when she smiled at the Jedi and laughed with the little boy who wore the desert on him until the very end, how could we not? After that, my planet wanted her to reign for life, and her children after that, and their children after that. It was a policy unheard of, but such was our love. She, of course, said no.  
_How can I accept such an offer, generous though it is_ , she asked me that night, after the celebration in the streets had quieted some and the scent of water lilies had faded from the air.  
_You must also have your chance, Eirtaé. And another after you. You would make a wonderful Queen._  
In the dark, I felt a hot tear slide into my pale hair.  
_Thank you, Majesty_. That is what I said. _How could I follow in your footsteps? I could never be Queen of Naboo after knowing you_. That is what my heart whispered. That is what I knew to be the truth.

It was best when we were just six teenage girls together. When we left the Palace at Theed and came to Lake Varykino. Sometimes we stayed with her family. More often we stayed with mine. We laughed until our stomachs hurt. Rabé made us all hold our breath with her daring leaps from the palazzo balconies into the water. Sabé told us stories about the Jedi and the Gunguns that we were all fairly certain she had made up, but we all listened to anyway. Sometimes Yané could be persuaded to sing an old water-song that we'd known from our cradles and we whispered the words along with her. We braided our hair, practicing new styles for our return. We made up policies that protected the weak and brought harmony to the galaxies: policies that would never work but that she believed in anyway. We swam in the lake under the cold light of the three moons: Ohma D’un was our favorite. Her face was pale blue and sad, and her name was like a song. In that way, she reminded me of the Queen.

Ohma D’un still waxes and wanes, but my queen is gone and I am an old woman now. I have heard it said that we all must die. Even queens before their time. Gone too are so many of my friends. I have walked beside the funeral boat of Queen Padmé Amidala. I have dressed Sabé and Rabé for their own boats. I have sung mourning songs for Saché and Yané, for Cordé and Dormé and for others who I did not know.  
I am the last. My children have never known the smell of lakewater. They do not even know how to swim. They have never seen my family’s palazzo. Only my oldest was born on Naboo. My children have grown up on Rebel bases with toy blasters and practical roughspun clothing. They do not know the meaning of the Scar of Remembrance. They have never seen it smile. They do know the name Padmé Amidala. They know the word democracy. They know what it is we are fighting for. We all pass into the stars in the end, but what we leave behind lives on.

My father wanted me to be Queen. The universe did not.  
How much better to be a handmaid when one serves such a Queen as I did.


	2. Saché

I was one of five.

The first time I saw the new Queen was when I was presented to her at the Palace of Theed. She was from the Lake Country; that was all anybody in my family knew of her. My little sisters and I had spent our whole lives in the busy noise of the capitol where the transports and drones swept overhead, and the crowd of vendors and buyers screamed at each other in the marketplace, and the roar of the waterfalls sang us to sleep. I did not know the meaning of the word _quiet_ until I met her. She seemed to save her words, choosing them carefully, and when they came out of her everyone stopped to listen.  
_What is your name?_  
I bowed low.  
_I am Saché Nimo, Your Majesty._  
_Captain Panaka tells me you are from a merchant family here in Theed._  
_He spoke true, Your Majesty._  
_I desire that you show me this city of yours that I might better understand the Capitol and its people._  
_It would be an honor, Your Majesty._

I took her to the Senate Seat of Theed, and to the monuments of those rulers who had come before her, where I saw Eirtaé press a hand to the statue of Queen Estathea. After lunch at my favorite café beneath the waterfalls, we came to the Hanging Gardens where we strolled along the mother-of-pearl pathways of the bright flower temple and tossed copper coins into the ponds for good luck. We handmaidens walked apart; from the Queen and from each other. This new guise was strange to us all. When we returned that night, the Queen pulled me aside.  
_I thank you, Saché, for showing me the Capitol. But if I am to be a true Queen of Naboo, I must see how all of my people live; not only the places that are clean and beautiful._  
The Scar of Remembrance had been washed from her lip, and I saw clearly how young she was. In her small face I saw my sister Sonja, only thirteen and full of mischief.  
_I cannot take you to these places, Your Majesty._  
I saw a shadow of stubborn anger pass over her, and I smiled for I had seen the same look in Sonja’s eyes. I understood now that she asked only out of courtesy.  
_I cannot take you as Queen of Naboo._

The second time we handmaidens stepped out into the chaos of Theed, we were six in number. We walked close together this time, for all of our hearts were pounding, though we grinned giddily to each other at our own daring. Six girls in matching green hoods passed beneath the marble archway of the marketplace. Padmé clutched my hand and I laughed as she pulled me into the hubbub. We bought pale waterstones to wear on slim chains around our necks. I negotiated the sale of three citrons with a Gungun grocer, and we passed them among ourselves as we strolled through the bright stalls. Some of the girls cringed at the constant assault of shouts and bumps and laughter. Eirtaé in particular looked uncomfortable and she stayed very close to Yané. Rabé nearly revealed us when she caught a boy in a ragged tunic trying to steal her money-purse. She had his skinny arm twisted behind his back, hissing furiously in Futhark while he yowled bloody murder when Padmé handed the boy her own purse, fat and full of coins.  
_We should have reported him, Your Majesty_ , Rabé complained as we continued on.  
_He was only a child, Rabé. And so hungry. Couldn’t you see his skeleton staring out from under his flesh?_

That night I could not sleep. How often had I wandered that same market? How many times had I seen hungry shadows sitting in doorways or stretched under the great marble fountain in the center of the square? How often had I hurried my sisters away that they might not see? My family was not wealthy, but we did not starve. Our influence was of a degree that I was accepted as a candidate for the Queen’s bodyguard. When my four sisters and I fell asleep listening to those ceaseless waterfalls; we were full and content and our dreams were pleasant. We had books and sturdy sandals and beds of our own. I felt pity when I saw those deformed and dejected shapes, but never had I stopped to offer comfort. I wondered what the boy’s name was and if he had sisters like I did. What would he buy with those royal coins? Could he guess the great kindness and wisdom of his new Queen? Did he know her name? Did he even care?

Eight years I served Queen Padmé Amidala. During the Invasion, I remained in Theed with Yané as her spy, passing information on the Trade Federation as we could. They gave us both a medal for it, afterwards, and I keep mine still. Not for the memories but for her thanks engraved on the back. A reminder that brave deeds in the name of freedom do not go unremembered. I returned many times to the marketplace, and at each visit I was prepared with a leather money-purse, heavy and emblazoned with the royal insignia of Queen Amidala. On one of my last visits, I spied the skinny boy who had tried to rob Rabé. He was tall and handsome now, dressed in a clean white tunic and selling toy boats at a stall of his own. A flock of happy children pressed copper coins into his hand and he laughed as he passed the wooden boats down. Some time after this encounter, I wrote a letter to the Senator Amidala of Naboo.

 _I have found him, Your Majesty._ (She was always Your Majesty to me). _The boy who started everything. I have found him and all is well. The marketplace is alive and thriving, as are all who come there. I thank you for your generosity in granting me this place in the Office of Social Welfare. I like to think that I have made a difference, but in truth, it was always you. Whatever compassion and courage I have found, I learned through your example. My sisters are all well, thank you for asking after them. Sonja in particular sends her regards. Say hello to the other girls for me and stay safe, Your Majesty. These are dangerous times for brave, clear-eyed women such as yourself. So as always, my prayer for you is: stay safe._

The marketplace is quieter now, and the hungry shadows have returned. When I enter there with my leather purses (smaller and lighter these days, but still bearing the insignia of Amidala) I must pass the Storm Troopers in their white armor that makes them all faceless and nameless. I do not wonder at their secret lives like I wonder at the lives of the poor. I fear that one day, perhaps soon, they will not lift aside their blasters and let me pass through the marble archway. I fear that one day the golden insignia will not go unnoticed. When the day comes and if it is asked of me, I hope I am brave enough to die in her name.


	3. Yané

My life has been filled with many loves. Some of their names I cannot remember. Other names I will never forget.

My first love was language. My father says it came from the Coruscanti poetry he read to my mother while I swam inside her, kicking at words like _miasma_ and _gloaming_ and _infinitesimal_. But my mother says it came from the old Futhark water-songs she half-whispered to my tiny unformed being, while her long, tapered fingers caressed the secret swell of her belly. Perhaps it was both, for I inherited my father’s love of poetry and my mother’s tapered fingers. There were many loves after those of language and poetry (moonflowers, the taste of oysters, the sun-burned boy who managed my mother’s garden), but these two were the loves that were the beginning of everything that was to come.

I was halfway through my first year at the Naboo Public Collegium when I was introduced to the new Queen. Her Director of Securities came to my school to recruit girls of a certain caliber to her detail of handmaidens. I did not put my name in for consideration. An interesting word: _handmaiden_. _Maiden_ suggesting pure, untouched and _hand_ suggesting the body. A fascinating contradiction. Waiting hand and foot on this Queen to whom their loyalty (synonym: honor, also insinuating maidenhead), and thus, their bodies are sworn even unto death. Sounds like quite the little cult, does it not? Besides, if I were accepted, it would put an end to my studies.  
But there I sat, secreted in the Collegium’s library under a very splendid oil-painting of the Jedi Temple, while the rest of the girls in my class were in the foyer, scanning (bleakly brief) lists of those who had been chosen, when a shadow fell across me and I was forced to surface from the depths of vernacular nuances of Outer Rim languages.  
_This is the one?_  
_Yes, Captain Panaka. This is Yané Faaro, our most gifted and promising linguistics student._  
Looking back, I still cannot quite believe the crisp, military-precise words that fall out of his mouth next.  
_Queen Amidala of Naboo requests an audience._  
As it happened, the lists posted in the university foyer gave only one name.  
Mine.

So I left the library, and the Collegium, the handsome Tattoine Ambassador's son I so loved to kiss, and the jealous, scathing stares of my classmates, but I did not, in the end, leave my studies. Instead, I became her tutor.  
_What is the Tunskrit for ‘to dance’?_ I would ask her, as we lounged in her apartments in the evenings. This was my favorite time of the day, and my favorite game to play.  
_Sambem_ , she would answer. She was very quick with the rudiments of language and a truly excellent mimic, but nuances often escaped her.  
_Conjugate it. Then translate into Huttese, Bocce, and Rodese._  
She never spoke Huttese with any confidence (she was too much a daughter of the Lake Country), but this is the language in which I remember her best. When I hear the short, clipped consonants and those vowels as long as the desert, I can see her face. Her serious eyes furrowed in concentration, biting on her thumbnail as she struggled through verb conjugations. Then, those same eyes wide and grey as stormclouds as I gave the answers as easily as the sea-herons take to the skies.

(There was another student, many years later. The young daughter of an Alderaanian diplomat, a few language lessons during the family's summers at Lake Varykino. She bit her lip with the same steadfast determination to conquer I had observed in my queen. Seeing it again made me smile; gave me hope for the dark years to come.)

  
_How is it so easy for you?_  
I remember the queen asking this one evening, as we handmaidens brushed out her heavy braids and washed the split-lip Scar from her face. At first, I could find nothing to say. But words and I had long been friends and as I bowed to bid her goodnight, I found the right ones.  
_My father says I was born with a word on my tongue. And once I tasted it, all the others came rushing down upon me, as the great waterfalls of Naboo rush into the Sapphire Sea._  
_What was the word?_  
I smiled.  
_Adara._

I loved her. I taught her to love words, and I taught her to use them. I taught her the utter inadequacy of Galactic Basic.  
_You can tell what is important to a people by how many words they have for it. Huttese has seventy-two words for sand. Futhark has sixty for water. In the language of the Twi’leks, you do not say, “I miss you.” You say, “you are missing from me.”_  
_Yané? Is there a language that has eighty words for love?_  
_If there is, I have not yet found it.  
Perhaps,_ she said thoughtfully, her stormcloud eyes far away, looking at something I was not able to see. _Perhaps, it is up to us to make one, when we find someone we love._

My last love was tall and quiet. I met him on Coruscant, at a reception for the newly elected Senator Amidala of Naboo. I found myself imagining eighty words for love. I had five bridesmaids, and I remember she laughed that she should at last be _my_ handmaiden after all these years. I cried when I left her. I, Yané Faaro, Naboo’s most promising linguistics student, wept to leave my Queen and return to my studies.  
_Adara_ , she whispered to me as my new husband, who spoke only Basic but teased languages I had never dreamed of from my tongue, carried our trunks onto the transport. _I looked it up. It is a word for love._  
_One of many, Your Majesty._  
_Yes_ , she said with a smile of her own. _One of many_.

I walked beside her funeral boat with Eirtaé and with Saché, with Rabé and Sabé whom I loved as I had loved her. And with others, whom I had not known, but whom I loved all the same because they had known and loved her. Naboo has sixty words for water, but only one of these also means tears. Grief does not mince words. Grief knows only emptiness and silence. Looking down at that serious face, so still and as always, so very small, I whispered the only words I had left, in the only language that could bear their weight.

_You are missing from me._


	4. Rabé

The life of a handmaiden was always to be my destiny.

No matter who my planet chose—even Eirtaé with her long face and silvery-blonde hair—I would have served her faithfully. I was a soldier’s child, the sister of soldiers, born with a name that means duty. I would not have known what else to do.

My father taught me to be vigilant. Even from the time I was small, I carried with me a weapon; a knife hidden in my boot or a poison dart tucked into my black hair, a blaster cleverly concealed beneath my cloak.  
_Travelling unarmed, my little Rabé, should feel like you are leaving home without your limbs._  
That is what he said to me at our kitchen table as I helped to clean the smallest parts of his blaster rifle. I loved to watch him put the gun back together; a delicate but dangerous puzzle. He used to tease me by leaving a piece out, to see if I noticed, if I could tell him where it was supposed to go.  
I always noticed. I always knew where it went. When I can’t fall asleep (and that’s often enough these days), sometimes I do it in my mind. _Take the rifle apart…put it back together…take it apart…and back together…_

My brothers taught me to fight. I broke my jaw when I was eight practicing hand-to-hand with my brother Atsu. I never forgot to tuck my chin again.  
When I was twelve, a sparring javelin thrown by my brother Bek fractured my collarbone. I ducked faster after that.  
When I was fourteen, I threw a knife at Danial. He still carries the scar on his left cheekbone. He never called me _daughter of a bantha_ again.  
They all became Royal Guards at the Palace of Theed. Bek used to steal pastries for us from the kitchens. Atsu helped to train us. I think it was Sabé who very nearly killed him with a blaster bolt. Danial fell in love with Yané, but she had other things to think about.

I had just turned fifteen when my father brought me to see Captain Panaka. The first test was a blaster pistol.  
_Take it apart_ , the Captain said. _Then put it back together. You have one minute._  
I finished in forty-seven seconds.  
The last test was target practice. I hit them all in the center, just as my father had taught me.  
_You’ve trained her exceptionally well, Lieutenant. Her talents will be put to good use in service of the young Queen._  
The Captain shook my father’s hand and handed me a contract to sign.  
I didn’t even read it.  
When my father took his leave, he held me close only for a moment. Then, with a hurried kiss and a reminder not to leave the palace without a weapon, he was gone with only the smell of shaving cream and blasterpowder left to keep me company. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized he was trying not to cry.

The queen I was destined to serve was kinder and younger than I had imagined. She liked to skip her homework and blame it on blaster practice taking up too much of her time. She complained when Saché pulled too tightly on her hair as it was twisted up into elaborate styles I had never imagined were possible, or when a pin was stuck in too far. She fell asleep during presentations of Coruscanti operas and gave her affection freely.

I think she worried about me. She did not like that I had grown up without a mother. I think the idea was inconceivable to her, who had always loved and been loved. I had been loved in my own way among the soldiers of my family, but never in the soft, enveloping way of a woman. She saw how I was at home on the training field or in the company of the Royal Guard, but how I seemed to be at sea amid five girls of my own age. They—those five girls of my age—they taught me what it is to have sisters. In the end, it was much the same as having three brothers. I learned to make my hands gentle when I braided Eirtaé’s pale hair. I learned to laugh when Saché told a dirty joke picked up from the Theed marketplace. Yané taught me to swear in Huttese, Bocce, Twi’lek, and Rodese. Sabé taught me patience, for she was never able to sit still as we applied the Scar of Remembrance and the twin red circles to her decoy’s face. And Padmé…  
Padmé taught me to dance (traditional Coruscanti waltzes and silly girl-dances), to see the beauty of the three moons dancing over the darkness of Lake Varykino, and the strange but useful power of diplomacy. She showed me one does not always need to carry a weapon.

But here, at the end of everything, my father’s advice was better. On the day the Imperial soldiers arrested me, I carried no weapon, for Naboo still kept the oil-flame burning beside her memorial stone (an act of Rebellion in itself). For the sake of her memory, I had thought myself safe. But that was a different time. A time when girls with far-seeing eyes and gentle hands were able to hold back the tide of war by sheer force of willpower and a sense of duty. Those days are gone.

In a shell-box under my cot in the barracks of the Naboo Intelligence Office, I kept a waterstone necklace on a golden chain, a bullet Captain Panaka had pulled out of my shoulder after the Invasion, a shell from Eirtaé’s palazzo on Lake Varykino, a really terrible drawing Sabé had done of the six of us, and a silver hair fastening given to me by Padmé Amidala on my twentieth Naming Day. As I wait to be led to my execution it is these items I turn over in my mind and not the small pieces of my father’s blaster rifle. _N_ _ecklace…one of six…bullet…I took it so she did not…seashell…diving from the highest balcony into cold, blue water…drawing…six stick figures in gowns like flames…hair fastening…she set it among my black waves herself…_

The door to my cell opens. I stand and my knees do not tremble. Dutiful to the end.

This, after all, this was always my destiny.


	5. Sabé

I was not supposed to be born.

I never knew my father’s name. He did not leave me with one. My mother died before she felt like sharing it with me. I did most of my growing up in an overcrowded orphanage in the center of Theed. I ran away twice each year. Each time, I made for the Naboo hangar. I wanted to fly away from the disappointment of who I was: the cold, the hunger, the loneliness of being unwanted and unloved. Up in the sky I might be cold and hungry and alone, but at least I would be _free_. They caught me at it when I was little and dragged me back, biting and scratching and hurling insults. When I was older, it was just to remind myself that I could still do it. No one came after me then, even though they knew where I was. Nobody, not even a Gungun, wanted a skinny girl of twelve with stork-legs for a daughter. Nobody missed me or wished I would come back.

I left for the last time on my thirteenth birthday. Even before I dropped out of the window and headed for the hangar at the Royal Air Base of Naboo, I knew I was never coming back. The plan was to talk myself onto a flyer and learn to be pilot. If that didn’t work, I was going to stow away and learn to be a pilot anyway. But I was a thirteen-year-old bastard girl whose experience in the actual world was limited to a handful of stolen afternoons and a few stupid dreams. Some midshipman in a green flight-suit caught me climbing on board a cargo ship and dragged me (scratching and biting and hurling insults) over to a tall man he called Captain.

 _Look what I found skulking around our hangar, Captain. Some dirty kid. Probably a thief looking for something worth selling on the streets._  
_Son of a bantha_ , I hissed.  
The tall man said nothing. He was staring at me. He was staring at me the way the little kids sometimes stared when I told them stories about Jedi Knights and lake creatures and lost princesses. Like they can’t quite believe it’s all real. But I wasn’t telling a story. I was just standing there; red-faced, furious, trying to claw the teenage pilot’s eyes out.  
_Stop_ , said the tall man. His eyes had changed now. They believed what they saw.  
_If I tell him to let go of you_ , he said to me _, will you stay to hear what I have to tell you? I have a job for you._  
I stopped biting. I stopped scratching. I stared right back.  
_I’m not sure it’ll be worth it._  
The tall man smiled.  
_Trust me, little girl. It’s better than wherever you came from._

The first time I saw her, it was like looking in a mirror. If I reached out my hand, hers would surely come forward to meet mine. Then I blinked, and we were separate again. She was softer. Her face rounder, her eyes gentler, her voice self-possessed and sure, her skin smooth and sunkissed. Like if you bit into her, the whole of the Lake Country would come pouring out to wash you in green and gold and blue.  
_My name is Padmé Naberrie. I am to be the new Queen of Naboo. Captain Panaka tells me you are to be my decoy._

Yes, that was what he told me too. A loyal servant. Bodyguard. Most honored of all the handmaids. Ready to die so that she might not. My duties were simple. Protect the Queen. Die in her name. I took the job. Die for a queen or die penniless and forgotten, mourned by no one. In the end after all, everyone dies. I decided it would be better to die where someone would remember my name.  
When the Captain asked about my family (apparently their signatures were also required), I told him I had none. As he rolled up my contract and handed me a liability release document to sign, I saw him smile to himself.  
_That’s…perfect._

_Yes, Your Majesty. I am Sabé. My life is yours._

Of course, she did not see it that way. We spent two months together before she took office. I had never been to the Lake Country before. I had never dreamed such peace existed. I stayed in a guest room at the Naberrie palazzo—a room the size of the 12+ wing at the orphanage. Her sister Sola poured us steaming mugs of kaffe in the mornings before our studies began.  
_Good morning to the twins with the bedheads and the frowning-faces_ , she used to say with a smile. Both of us were too sleepy and grumpy to reply. We spent our days learning to play one another. We watched endless streams of holograms: each of us walking, talking, sitting, standing, dancing, laughing, smiling. The transformations had to be complete. We had to know each other better than we knew ourselves. I learned she had a scar on her right thigh from a boating accident. That she breathed through her nose when she was angry or frightened. She listened to my stories of the orphanage and reached out with her hands as if she believed she could take away the memories of hunger and chill and loneliness with one gentle touch. (I'm not convinced she couldn't.) She learned to write left-handed, and I learned to use a blaster with my right. We aped each other’s voices until we could not be sure who had spoken. We practiced applying the Scar of Remembrance and the twin spots of Balance and Symmetry. She always bit her lip too soon, before the paint was dry, and we had to start again. I could not sit still, and she placed Balance too high or Symmetry too low. We learned to do these things on purpose, to make each other laugh.  
It was, in the end, unavoidable. She had that way about her. I became what she expected of me. I became her friend. I didn’t know what to do with a friend. I’d never had one before. It was slow and sweet. Full of shared secrets and secret messages. Midnight swims. Falling asleep in the lemon grove and waking up stiff but fragrant and sun-golden. Throwing chestnuts at Sola and her friends. Taking each other’s places and making Captain Panaka guess which girl we were. Sometimes he guessed right.

During the Invasion, I learned that I loved her. Fear of death tells us who really are, and it showed me that if her life was stolen, mine would not be worth the living. The black feathered headdress weighed heavy upon me as we returned in secret to the hangar where all of this had started for me. A skinny girl with stork legs in a ponderous black dress trailed by five others wreathed in gowns like candle flames. I spoke with Amidala’s voice as I turned to face her. To send my warning of danger, my message of love. Her voice was her own, sweet and small.  
_We are brave, Your Highness._  
I had no choice but to follow where she led.

I kissed her one time, and only once. It was the Day of Peace, when the Gunguns were welcomed into the Capitol. It was the day when everyone, even the solemn young Jedi Knight laughed aloud. The night was soft with lantern light and the smell of waterlilies. We stood facing each other as we did at our first meeting: Symmetry and Balance, two mirror images, dark-haired, solemn brown eyes, but me slightly taller now. And always skinnier. I never left the hunger of my youth behind me. She pulled me close. My lips, without meaning to and yet longing to do nothing else, found hers. It was indeed like tasting the Lake Country; like milk and honey and starlight. She did not pull away, and I loved her for it. She did not avoid my eyes or stop making me laugh or send me from her side in the days, the weeks, the years that followed, and I loved her even more.

But I could not stay near. It hurt me too much. She could not return my love. So when her term was up and my contract was fulfilled, I slipped away like the blue lap of Lake Varykino from the verdant shore. I became a pilot, as I had always intended. I flew in machines that bore the seal of Naboo, the seal that had for a time been hers. I saw the sky (blue and black and full of slowly-dying stars) and found myself free at last. My life was my own, bound to no one.

I wish to this day that I had been brave enough to stay with her to the end.

I felt it when she died. I was two planetary systems over, flying five hundred miles per hour, but I felt something small break inside of me. I saw the stars blink out. I’d have given anything, then, to have been standing in her place. She was not mine to miss. She was not mine to mourn. So as I walked beside her boat, the tears on my face were small and hot and elegantly slid down my cheeks in twin streams. Careful, controlled, the tears of a queen. In all these years, I had not forgotten how she walked, talked, wept, danced, laughed, smiled, read, loved. She was a part of me. But some had seen that mask before, and had learned how to read it. It was Yané who whispered to me later that she had called for me sometimes in her sleep, asked after me at Air Stations, beamed with pride when pilots said they knew my name, kept a candle burning at the old palazzo with my name carved in its wax.  _Sabé-Sister._ It was then that my heart broke and the grief came at last.

Sola gave me the letter. I will not tell you what it said only that the jagged edge inside of me began to scar over and breathing again became possible. That though she was gone, I was not. And there was work to be done. The same as me, she did not forget. She knew me better than I knew myself. We were Balance and Symmetry to the bitter end.

I am Sabé Noname and I was not supposed to be born. I served Queen Amidala of Naboo as Royal Decoy. I served Senator Padmé Amidala in the Naboo Royal Air Force. Though she is gone, I still serve in her name. I fly missions out of Resistance bases and the red Flame of the Alliance burns brightly on my Starfighter. In the heady weightlessness of the stratosphere I feel her presence near me. I hear her whispering in my ear, and I laugh.  
_Fly true, Sabé-Sister. You did not do me wrong. Never stop fighting. Your life is worth something. Fight for it. Fight to make this galaxy free._  
It is dangerous work, and if you are watching this hologram, you will know that I am no more. You will know that somewhere we sit side by side among the stars. Balance and Symmetry. Separated always by the Scar of Remembrance. Twins. Sisters. Holy and pure lovers. You will know that my last words were _I am brave, Your Highness_. If you are watching this, it is now safe to tell.

I loved a girl named Padmé Naberrie, and she loved me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't mean to imply that Sabe and Padme were maybe half-sisters, but it's kind of there...and i kind of like it


	6. Cordé

_Time: Twelve-hundred hours. Thirty minutes from Coruscant._

Hello my dearest little Hollélina!

_The holodisk shows the face of a young woman. She wears a sumptuous white travelling cloak and her brown hair has been arranged in a style favored by the former Queen Amidala of Naboo. She smiles very often and illustrates her words with her hands._

Do you remember when we snuck into the Retiring Room at the Senate Seat in Theed? Father had brought us with him because Mother was hosting tea with the Ambassadors from Coruscant, Alderaan and the Trade Minister from Hoth and she didn’t want us underfoot. (You remember how many teacups were broken when she asked us to serve the Birrenian minister’s wife. You say it was because you tripped over your hem. I still say it was because you were scared of her. So many tentacles!) So Father brought us to his office at the Senate and we were going to help him organize his holodisks and file folders, but he got called to an emergency floor hearing and we played hide-and-seek instead. You were the one who hid in the liquor cabinet in the Retiring Room. It took me forever to find you, do you remember? Only you would be brave (and stupid) enough to hide in a room marked _Senators and Aides Only_. You gave yourself away when you broke the decanter of Betethi cognac. Do you remember how we used my red cloak to mop it up? It was my favorite, but I didn’t mind. And then you started to cry because you thought Father would lose his Senate seat because you’d smashed the most expensive bottle in the cabinet? And do you remember what I told you? I told you that no one would ever find out, and if they did, you were to tell them that it was me who snuck in and broke it. Father never knew. We threw the cloak away and said it had been lost when Mother asked about it. And then when Father came home one day many weeks later and told how Senator Palpatine had complained because his favorite cognac was missing, we both laughed like it was the funniest joke in the Naboo system. (It was. It still is.)

_Here the holodisk stutters a bit as the aircraft comes within the electromagnetic field of the planet Coruscant. The woman’s face flashes and fades, her smile stuck for a moment or two. Then, the signal returns._

Being a handmaiden is something like that day in the Retiring Room. You’ll know the feeling too, soon enough. You must be willing to sacrifice what you love the most to keep another safe. I’d give up more than that little red cloak to keep you safe, Hollé. It is the same with Senator Amidala. Father would be proud to hear that you and I have sworn our lives to a politician like her. She votes the same way he did. With her heart. I think you will like her, little Hollé, if you can remember your manners. She is headstrong and brave like you. You must try to counsel her as our mother counsels us. As I try to counsel you, futile as that is!

_At this moment, the young woman is interrupted by an officer wearing a flightsuit. His words are indistinct. After delivering his message, he exits with a sharp bow._

Fifteen more minutes until Coruscant, little Hollé. Coruscant! Can you imagine? I’ve been watching for it out the window, but we’re still too high and the smog is too thick. It just looks like a sea of lights and smoke. It’s all gray, not blue and green like our Naboo. The Senator says it is a beautiful planet, for all its noise and fog. She says it is like an engine. So many tiny parts moving in perfect rhythm to create motion and life. She says you have to respect its intricacy. She says funny things like that sometimes; she knows how to make you think. Some days I think she is something close to wise. Other days she’s just a young woman who cannot sit still and throws volumes of the Galactic Law at flower vases because she’s so sick of reading them. Don’t worry, Hollé, she never throws them at you, and she always apologizes after and cleans up the glass pieces herself. But even if she did throw a book at you, you are definitely not allowed to throw one back at her! Remember that!

 _There is another knock, and the young woman turns to speak to the officer in the flightsuit again. She nods many times before he leaves again with another bow_.

Well, Hollélina, they tell me it’s time to make our landing, and I still need to be briefed about travel procedures to the Galactic Senate. Study as hard as you can, because it’s the books that you’ll need more than the blaster training. Try to listen to Captain Panaka and try not to talk back, even if you know you’re right. I’ve told the Senator about you, and she wants to meet you as soon as you’ve passed. So hurry up and pass already so that you can come and stay with me. Together, we’ll make our father proud. Give Mother a kiss for me and tell her not to worry. This vote will be over before it's begun and we'll all be back at home on Naboo. And anyway, I’m doing my part to keep our planet and our family safe. I miss you and I love you and I’ll see you again soon. All my love!

_Here the young woman blows a kiss and leans forward to end the holo-recording. There is a burst of static, then nothing._

 

_This holodisk was returned to the family of Cordé Parsa, daughter of the influential late Senator Jawhara Parsa of Naboo, after her assassination at the Coruscanti airfield. The disk was blackened with soot, but still played. It was placed into the hands of Hollé Parsa, the younger sister of Cordé, by Senator Padmé Amidala herself. The Senator paid for the funeral boat and walked beside it. Hollé Parsa returned with Senator Amidala to Coruscant after the ceremony. She served the young Senator faithfully throughout the Clone Wars, and later became a member of the Galactic Senate herself following the overthrow of the Empire and Darth Vader. She is credited with many humanitarian laws put in to effect, laws that Senator Amidala was believed to have been drafting before her death. She also was able to push through a small, insignificant bill that introduced much more stringent safety measures upon all aircrafts and airfields. It is commonly referred to today as Cordé’s Bill._

_This holodisk is preserved and housed at the Naboo Royal Library as an artifact of the Naboo Senate and the days of the Clone Wars._


	7. Dormé

I can still remember the day that she was born.

Padmé Naberrie, who would become Queen Amidala of Naboo and then Senatorial Representative, came red-faced and screaming into the world in the middle of summer. She was born at her family’s lakehouse and I stood out in the hall with Sola and listened to the smallest baby in Naboo make more noise than a bantha in a hurricane. We were five years old and we both regarded Sola’s new sister with a healthy mix of dislike, caution, and fierce love. We both knew, even then, not to get in her way.

I had no sister. I had no brothers. I had only my parents, and they did not seem to want me as much as the Naberries did. It was not that my mother and father did not love me. I never wanted for anything. I had private tutors and music lessons and toys and trinkets enough to entertain the entirety of the Lake Country. But my parents, having done what was expected in bringing a child and heir into the world, did not appear to have any special interest in actually being parents. In summertime, I came running down the seaglass path between our lakehouses to the Naberrie kitchen where Jobal opened the door with one hand and fed tiny Padmé bits of mashed-up strawberries with the other. Sola would seize me immediately and we were gone again; out the door to swim in Lake Varykino, or steal citrons from the Silva family’s lemon groves, or else to climb the willow tree outside Sola’s bedroom window looking for bird nests. My mother sighed and shook her head when I returned in the evening, sore-footed and sleepy and as happy as the Faa fish that darted like moving rainbows beneath the lake-water.  
_Go and take that muddy dress off, Dormé,_ she would say, already moving away from me. _We have the Chancellor Yutan and the Corellian Crown Princess coming for dinner. Tell the nursemaid to wash your hair as well. You look like a Hutt._

The Naberrie lakehouse was as different from mine as Naboo was from Tattooine. There, there was laughter and good-natured argument and the occasional small tantrum from Padmé. There was lemon pie, open windows, noise, chaos. My family’s palazzo was widely considered the most beautiful in the district. There were mahogany tables, gold-leaf in the floor tiles, crystal vases from Alderaan, ocean-glass window panes from Kamino, all exquisitely arranged and immaculately maintained. I was not allowed to run or to shout. When I was in the company of my parents, I was expected to be clean, quiet, and still. I had always been an obedient child. I did as I was told.

We grew older. Padmé was allowed to trail behind us as Sola and I went on our summer adventures. She was the bossiest child I have ever encountered, but her stubborn nature was tempered by an earnest sweetness that prompted her to follow up furious outbursts with a hasty hug or a tearful apology. The summer we learned that she had been named Queen of Naboo, she tried ordering Sola and I about the house like my mother ordered her host of servants. We brought her _kaffe_ laced with salt instead of sugar, and beat her with pillows until she was laughing so hard she couldn’t draw breath.

When she left for the capitol with the skinny girl who was her mirror image in so many ways, but quieter by far, the Lake Country settled into its simple routine once more now that our whirlwind girl was gone. Life went on. The three moons waxed and waned. The Silvas' oldest son proposed to me. I kissed him but my answer was no. Sola became engaged. She was married in the wintertime and Padmé returned for the festivities. She laughed just as easily as ever, but her eyes were grave with a wisdom I had never seen in them before. Then there came the starving times of the Blockade. I still remember the long weeks we spent in the camps; dirty, hungry, and afraid. Lakewater tasted sweeter after we were released. The sun shone brighter. Silence was a luxury. I stood between my parents at the celebration and laughed as the waterlily petals rained down like fragrant snows. A girl I almost did not recognize smiled on the Palace steps. Her gown was white and glowing like the ice of our moon, Tasia. I thought of the sweltering morning that girl was born, of her lusty screaming. My heart almost broke with the pride.

It was almost ten years before I saw Padmé Amidala again. She had returned home to Lake Varykino before her first term as Senator of Naboo was due to begin. I was reading in the drawing room when my mother appeared to inform me that there was someone here to see me. I had thought it would be Sola.

 _Please may I sit?_ she asked in a voice that had not changed all that much since childhood; still demanding and soft all at once.  
_Of course, Your Majesty._ I said it to tease her; to see if she still smiled. She did.  
Much of what was said that afternoon has been forgotten. It was, after all, so very long ago. But this much I do remember. She wished me to return with her to Coruscant to serve as her handmaid. I think she missed having those five girls close to her. I think it was the absence of that tall, quiet one who looked so much like her that hurt her the most.

For the first time in my life, I openly defied my parents. They wished me to stay; to do my duty and be married as a Naboo noblewoman should be. But I thought of little Padmé’s face as she sat in that drawing room, the loneliness and longing that clouded those wide eyes, and I knew what my answer must be. So I left with her. Sola came to see us off.  
_Protect her, Dormé,_ she whispered as she embraced me warmly. _As if she were your own sister._  
I smiled and Sola laughed with me. For when had I ever done anything else?

I did what I could for her. I became a shadow with a serious face and blue robes. I watched and I listened. I was still and quiet, much as I had ever been, except when running wild with two barefoot sisters on the shores of Lake Varykino. When the handsome Jedi Knight (who was almost as serious as I) came with his young Padawan, I saw what even Padmé could not. She was in love.

I remember how she cried in my arms after Cordé and Versé were killed. She thought it had been her fault. I did what I could to convince her otherwise, but I fear she bore that grief until the end. I remember her—all curls and moonlight—on the night it was decided she had to leave Coruscant in order to stay alive. I remember crying on the transport platform as she was borne far away from me with the boy who she loved but did not know she loved. I could protect her from everything except her own heart. That part of her had always been wild and ungovernable. Where it led, she followed recklessly.

When she came back to me, she bore ragged scars across her back and a heart so full she almost seemed to fly. I kept her secret. Even from Sola, I kept it. I carried secret messages; left them in hidden places for the boy with hair the color of Tattoine sandstorms. I lied for her, held her hair in the mornings when she was so sick she almost could not move. I let out her gowns, even made them myself when it was no longer safe to trust her seamstress. I protected her as if she were my own flesh and blood. In the end, she _was_ my sister. Blood has nothing to do with love. It was an easy choice to make.

Now, after all that has happened, I wonder if it was the right one. It has been many years and still, I keep her secret. I keep it just as she instructed me. I sit here on this stone bench in this garden that is forever in the shadow of the purple mountains, and I do as I have always done. I watch and I listen and I obey. Across the garden, Queen Breha motions for me to approach.  
_Go with Dormé, my little Leia-love. I will be in soon and then we’ll have a game together._  
The Queen passes me a small hand that is sticky with flower nectar.  
Together, a young girl who came screaming into the world and I walk back toward the white palace of Alderaan.

She squeezes my hand tightly as if she is afraid I might let her go.  
_No fear of that, little one. I gave a promise._

_I intend to keep it._


	8. Teckla Minnau

All my life, I have been hungry.

 

My village was small. The Holonet lists its population at 1500, but this is probably an overestimate. People die every day in Bluewater. Bluewater used to be a fishing village. My father says it used to hum with watersongs as the fishermen pulled their catch in from the Sapphire Sea, as they mended nets, as their knives dove in and out of fish-flesh in the _agora_. No one sings in Bluewater anymore. Except the burial song. Everyone knows the words to that one. 

My father’s nets hang against one of our kitchen walls. I used to sit there in the twilight and let my fingers wander over the delicate fibers, feeling the intricate woven pattern as the darkness grew deeper. To my rough, unschooled fingers those fishing nets felt as fine as lace. My father deals Sabaac at one of Bluewater’s many cantinas now. He has done this since I was born. The gnarled, careful fingers that so skillfully wove nets deal out the cards with a fluid grace. In the gambling business, this is a good thing. My father has never once been accused of cheating.

When I was small, I used to think that Bluewater’s poverty was my fault. It sounds silly to me now, but I am older these days. I have seen more. The thing is; I was born on the night of the tsunami that changed the currents of our freshwater bay. The huge schools of Faa and scalefish that fed our village and much of Theed don’t come to Bluewater anymore. The bay is too full of salt now. The same salt that leaked from my mother’s eyes that night as the village healer handed a newborn girl into her waiting arms. The same salt that my father cried as he staggered in through the doorway, soaked to the skin by the rains, to place a kiss upon my tiny red forehead and to give me a name.

“Teckla…rainstorm.”

A better name for me would have been _hunger_.

 

I learned to take small bites. It helped to make my meals last longer. When I was seven I learned not to ask for more. I had scarfed down my little supper and held out my tin plate for another helping.

“Stop it, Teckla!” my mother had snapped. “There’s nothing left!”

But my father, my quiet, hulking father with the sea-chapped hands, he tipped his half-eaten plate onto mine with a smile.

“Nonsense, my love. There is always something more to give.”

I ate the rest of his battered fish, but I cried myself to sleep that night, thinking of my father lying awake, still hungry, when it should have been me.

 

As soon as I was able, I began to work. It was only small jobs at first. Small jobs for a small girl. One of the merchants in the _agora_ paid me a few credits to shuck mussels. Sometimes she even sent me home with the ones she couldn’t sell. I resoled boots. I stitched torn seams. On my fifteenth birthday, my father finally allowed me to take a job in Scully’s Cantina. I served food and poured vile drinks and learned to do sums in my head. Anything that was burned, I was allowed to take home when my shift ended. I harvested yobshrimp in the summertime in the mouth of the bay. We ate well enough those months, and the three weeks in winter when those fishermen who were brave and wealthy enough to harvest in the Sapphire Sea returned with their pulls. But every other day, I fell asleep barely fed and bone-tired.

 

The year my mother got sick was the year that Padmé Amidala came to Bluewater as part of her re-election campaign. It was largely a media stunt, meant to portray her as compassionate and concerned with the plight of even the poorest of her people. She was expected late that afternoon. The former Queen of Naboo was to meet with certain villagers—carefully selected by her campaign staff—before delivering a holovised speech in the _agora_. That morning I had been at the herb stand in the _agora,_ bartering for medicine to ease my mother’s racking coughs. But I had virtually nothing to trade for it, and the price outright was too high, so I was forced to leave emptyhanded. I hated crying, always had. I suppose there was already too much salt in my life. But I cried that morning as I walked through the dirty streets that had once been alive with music, back to our tiny house where my mother lay dying on a cot because I had been born in the middle of a tsunami that changed everything.

That was when I saw her. She was small. So much smaller than she appeared on the holoscreens. Her face had been wiped clean of ceremonial makeup, but I knew her by the Theed-made silk she wore, the silent and cloaked women who followed close behind her, and the roundness of her body. No villager of Bluewater was so well-fed. I think, more than anything, it was the lace embellishment on her simple gown that did it. I thought of my father’s nets I had so admired, and I saw now that they were rough and ugly compared to the beauty of what money could buy. 

“What do you think, Your Majesty?” I shouted at her. “Are we poor enough to make you kind? Do we suffer enough to win your sympathy?”

Instantly, the three cloaked women surrounded her. One pulled a small blaster from the folds of her gown and I knew she could kill me if she chose. I almost hoped she would.

But Amidala placed a hand on the woman’s back—gently, I noticed, as one would touch a lover—and said _no._

“What is your name?” she asked.

I remember standing there, with a face full of tears and snot, shaking in anger and wondering why, of all the things she could have, _should have_ , asked me; why she began with this.

“I am called Teckla Minnau,” I stammered finally.

“And are you suffering, Teckla Minnau?” Her eyes were cool and gray. They held mine fast.

“My mother has less than a month to live. My father used to be a netmaker but now all his hands are good for is dealing Sambaac. I had a sister once!” My voice broke here. I remember that. “Her name was Nani. She lived for three days. My mother couldn’t feed her, because she couldn’t feed herself, because we don’t receive welfare from the Republic anymore because they prefer to spend their credits on themselves!”

She made a move as if to reach out to me, but I flinched away.

“You can’t sleep when you’re hungry, did you know that?” I spat at her. “I keep my hair short because we don’t have enough running water to wash properly. I have sung the burial song so many times the words don’t mean anything! I can count my ribs, but my father’s stick out even farther because some nights he doesn’t eat so that I can! Your bracelet would feed a family of seven for a week. Your dress could save my mother, but _I_ can’t! I can’t save her!” Then finally, my anger spent… “I am so tired of being hungry.”

I turned my back on her and walked away.

 

That night, I did not go to the _agora_ to hear Padmé Amidala speak. Instead I sat with my mother, and held her hand as she slept. I thought of the hunger pangs in the pit of my stomach and of the lace on the senator’s dress. I thought of Nani, who would be nineteen now. I felt so old…

There was a knock on the door.

One of the cloaked women—not the one with the blaster—stood on our crooked stoop.

“Padmé Amidala sends her regards. And this, for your mother.” The woman held out a leather pouch. “And she wishes to offer you a place as one of her handmaidens. If you accept, please present yourself at the docking station at dawn tomorrow morning.”

She was gone before I had a chance to close my gaping mouth.

 

It was medicine in the pouch, and according to my father, another like it arrived every day for two months until my mother was well. He tells me that there is a school in Bluewater again, and that every month, a silver starship bearing the insignia of the Naboo Royal Air Force arrives with a shipment of grain and fruit and a staff of medbots. I have to take his word for it, for I have not been back to Bluewater for some time. The Senator Amidala requires me at her side. She pays me well, perhaps too well, but I didn’t accept her offer for the money. She never mentions it, but I have noticed that every month, one of her gowns along with several pieces of jewelry is missing from the wardrobe in her chambers.

I send most of my credits back home, for I have no real need of them here. I am not hungry anymore. And if my father is to be believed, some small schools of scalefish have begun to return to the baywaters for the first time in twenty-five years. Bluewater does not prosper yet; perhaps never will again, but there is singing in the streets these days, and my family no longer starves. It seems that my debt of gratitude is nearly paid up. But I look at her, sitting up late at night with treatises and weapons proposals, trying to find a way to write policies that will help those who have nothing, and I think, _I can stay another moon…another month…another year…_

 

For just as my father said, there is always something more to give.


	9. Ellé

My mother was what the Naboo call a _water-witch_. It was whispered that she could call down rainstorms and sing saltwater up from the dry earth; when she cast the bones of the Mee fish upon our kitchen table, she could see the future spread out before her like the waves of the Sapphire Sea from the shore.  
For as long as I can remember, the desperate and hopeless of Theed have crowded outside our door as evening falls; when the tides come in and the moons begin to rise. They came for healing charms and for birthing spells: some to quicken the life blossoming inside them and others to suffocate it. They came for wisdom and herbs and sometimes for curses. But mostly…mostly it was love that drove them to my mother the _water-witch._

From a little girl, I learned the signs of lovesickness. Girls came begging with a few credits and a silver amulet to trade…their hair lank and lifeless, with pale lips and fevered eyes. They scratched the insides of their wrists and twisted their skirts in their hands. Men came—some young and beautiful, others older, married, and miserable—and none could not look my mother in the eye. She gave them all what they asked for—for better or worse—so long as they had the credits to pay: bracelets boiled in seawater for beauty charms, talismans and tonics to beckon true loves, long braids of kelp to bind two souls in harmony. They took their cures and fled into the night.  
_Be careful_ , my mother cautioned, as she brewed seaweed tea for married noblewomen in love with young and penniless pilots, or threw the bones of the Mee fish for boys who sought the girl who was in love with another. _When you turn the tide, you must be willing to accept the other changes that come with it.  
We are_ , they all chorused without hesitation, hungry and reckless with love.

They should have listened closer.

 

My mother never told me who my father was. I asked many times. All she did was smile and whisper that my father was the seafoam that rides the waves of the Sapphire Sea. She had stepped into the water one night under the pale blue light of Ohma D’un with only her waterstone necklace set about her shoulders, and there I was. Curled like a conch inside her.  
_That’s where those grey eyes of yours come from, Ellé_ , she’d say as she took me in her brown arms. _You are a child of the sea.  
_ When the three moons are full and the tide is high, I still believe her.

 

I was fifteen when my mother changed my fate. We were attending the birth of a child who had turned within his mother’s womb. Her husband was a captain, a veteran of the Blockade Days. His face was drawn and pale when he opened his door to us.  
_I am Shira Sun. We are here to save the child_ , my mother said in the darkness.  
The captain could see the truth of who we were by my mother’s blue veil and the tattoos scrolling across her arms. Later, I wondered who sent for the _water-witch_ and her apprentice daughter. Was it a handmaiden concerned for her mistress? Was it the captain himself? Or did my mother simply divine what was coming and choose to act? I will never know now, for my mother has gone where she cannot answer me.  
Whoever had sent for us, Captain Panaka allowed us entry. We saved the child and the mother, and for payment, the great Shira Sun, the _water-witch_ of Theed, asked only for her daughter to be granted a place as handmaiden to Senator Padmé Amidala.  
_She is clever and quick to learn. Her hands are steady. You saw what she achieved today. Your son draws breath because of my Ellé._  
_I will speak to Captain Typho_ , the captain promised, cradling his new son in his arms. _Rest assured; your daughter has my confidence._

 

Some nights later, in our own apartments, my mother washed and braided my black hair while she sang to Ahala, the ancient goddess of the ocean who guides the boats home into their berths.  
_Why do you wish to send me from your side?_ I asked.  
_There is a woman who will need you. You have water in your soul, and she will have need of it. Do as she asks, my love. Your river stretches before your feet, far away from me. You must follow it to your fate, Ellé._  
But I was not my mother. I was no _water-witch._ Just a girl with birthing hands and quiet ways.  
_How will I know my fate when it comes,_ _Ami_? I whispered in the lamplight. _How will I find this woman?_  
My mother wound my braids with blue thread; a charm against evil. In the morning, I would go to begin my life as a handmaiden.  
_She will come to you on fire._

 

My training was long. Long and lonely. The other girls avoided me, for my mother’s fame was great. _Water-witching_ was not expressly forbidden on Naboo, but it was an ancient practice tied to an even older religion that had faded away. In this age of droids and holonets, it was practically obsolete. Obsolete, but still feared. I heard them whispering at night…some thought my mother was a demon, others said that they had seen her walking in the open marketplace followed by a thundercloud. One girl was convinced that my mother was able to communicate with the sea monsters who hunted in our planet’s core, and that she could call them up to devour us all. Another girl said that they were being ridiculous and told them to go to sleep. This was Moteé, and I began to train beside her. She taught me to use a blaster, and I taught her how to identify basic poisons. When Cordé Parsa and Versé Tylish were assassinated at the Coruscanti airfield, the river of fate came to carry me further along its course. I sent a silent prayer of thanks to Ahala that it carried Moteé beside me.

 

The Senator was small and quiet. Her smile was like light dancing over the Sapphire Sea. I loved her from the start. She did not mind that my mother was Shira Sun. She used to ask me about my days as the _water-witch’s_ apprentice, full of curiosity about my mother’s cures and charms, though I don't think she ever quite believed in them. There was too much of knowledge and logic in her. She laughed often in those days, in the beginning. That’s why I did not see it until it was much too late. I could recognize bad love from a parsec away. But she was joyous, pink and golden in her love. There was nothing I could do.

 

But I had birthing hands. I knew her secret almost before she did. Dormé was the only one she allowed to dress her, but she always called on me to arrange her hair. I turned to my mother’s wisdom. I stitched pieces of shell into her gowns and brewed her tea with the petals of waterlilies. I braided blue threads into her curls, or chose blue earrings I had blessed with lake water. Always blue. The color of water, the color of life. It was not enough.  
_You don’t laugh anymore, my lady_ , I said to her one day.  
She was so pale; I could see the delicate web of veins behind her ears.  
_I’m tired these days, Ellé_ , she replied, and her voice was sad and empty.  
I knelt before her and pressed a piece of carved coral into her hand. I hoped she would understand my intent was only to keep her and the child safe. That I would sooner die than betray her trust.  
_Sleep with this under your pillow, my lady. It will bring peace to you and the secret you carry._  
Her eyes flashed, but she accepted my gift all the same.

 

 My mother had told me that I must follow my river to my fate. I had forgotten what that fate was until the night when the city began to burn. I will never forget how small she seemed, cradled in the Jedi’s arms.  
_I will tend to her!_ I remember shouting this through the rain and the confused tangle of people and medbots. When I pressed my hand to her forehead, her skin raged with fire.  
My mother’s magic is in the water. Water gives life, and takes it away. To grant love, another must lose it. To save a life requires the sacrifice of another. I knew all of this, for my mother taught me well. And yet…  
I could smell the ashes that lingered in her hair and feel the fever burning in her bloodstream. She was suffering…choking...dying with love but she asked me to save her children. And so I did. I brought them into the world with a bowl of water, a length of blue cloth, and my birthing hands. One girl and one boy. She named them and held my hand as she died. This was where my river had carried me. This was my fate, and I wept for it.

 

It is many years since I wore the veil of a handmaiden. I wear a different veil now; it is blue and once belonged to my mother. My hands and arms are still clear and brown, for I am not quite a _water-witch_. I do not deal in love or curses. My business is with life. I am the first thing the children of Theed see in this world. I clear their eyes and open their noses and pass them to their mothers’ waiting arms.  
In each of these children, I see the girl and the boy who will never know their own mother, and I think on the wonders they will yet work in this world. A world of darkness, yes, but a world that promises hope.  
A world full of blue. The color of life.


	10. Moteé

On paper, I was the perfect handmaiden; the most recent in a long line of former handmaidens and public servants.  
My mother was handmaid to Queen Changla; her mother was handmaiden to Queen Vandana, and her mother served as handmaid to Queen Estathea before her. When Padmé Naberrie was elected Queen of Naboo, my family tried to hide their disappointment when I was not selected to serve. They could not fathom why a girl with a history such as mine had been overlooked. I was the right age, more or less. I resembled the young queen, had some skill with a blaster, and my education was impressive. I was the obvious choice.  
She never knew that I found out, but my mother went to speak to Captain Panaka after I was passed over. She needn’t have bothered; I could have told her why I was not among the chosen number. The Queen herself has a choice in who serves her, and Padmé Naberrie did not want me.

I tried not to let myself grow bitter. While the new Queen Amidala received foreign dignitaries and drafted the Clean Water Act of BBY 33, I was accepted into the Legislative Youth Program. Coruscant was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. I loved it from the very first. Lights and sounds and music came from everywhere I looked. Speeders flashed above my head. Species from every planet in the galaxy could be found on any street corner. At night, the air was alive with noise, and people said you could see Coruscant glowing from Jakku. No one here knew that I had not been chosen to serve the Queen of Naboo. No one here cared.

 

I threw myself into the program, quickly becoming one of the top students. I had a mind for data and facts, and I never seemed to forget anything once I had read it. The Naboo invasion became one of our assignments. We drafted a vast array of hypothetical solutions in the form of treatises, new alliances, (not even I remembered the Gunguns) and a few declarations of war. Each night, the other students returned to their dormitories congratulating one another on the success of the day’s discussion. I smiled and laughed with the rest of them, but cried myself to sleep, thinking of my family living in the camps and afraid of what might become of the home planet I had never much cared for until now. I was surprised as anyone when news reached us of the liberation. No one had expected the queen to succeed. And to lead the attack herself! It was unheard of in a politician. Our realm was one of paper and ink, of argument and discussion. Ours was the realm of the theoretical. But this young queen had united with a species considered to be little more than primitive animals, and thrown herself into the middle of a war without any fear at all. I watched the holoreels with my friends, torn between pride and jealousy.

I was allowed to return to Naboo for the Day of Peace. I stood between my parents at the palace steps as Boss Nass and his people were welcomed into Theed. My eyes never left the Queen and her five silent handmaidens. There was an easy grace between them, a fluidity, a trust. They loved her, and she loved them in return. One of them whispered something in her ear, and she laughed. The Scar of Remembrance on her lip stretched wide with her joy. I would never see her smile like that again.

I grew older. I graduated from the University of Theed with a law degree and courses in diplomacy and constitutional history. I worked one year as a clerk under Jawhara Parsa at the Senate Seat of Theed before being invited to train with Captain Typho of the Naboo Royal Guard. The next time a handmaiden was wanted, I was selected.

 

Looking back, I’m not sure what I had expected…perhaps that it would be like it was so long ago on the steps of the Palace of Theed. That it would be easy. That I would whisper in her ear and she would laugh. That she and I would work together to change the galaxy. But I was never to be Padmé Naberrie’s friend. She always liked Ellé and the others better. I suppose I was too smart, too confident in my own abilities. When I finally lived up to my family’s destiny, I found I did not want to be a handmaiden. I wanted to be the Senator.  
But I did my duty. I tested every piece of food that was ever laid before her and laid out her fine clothes and followed exactly two paces behind her everywhere she went. I was silent and obedient and seething inside. I memorized her daily schedule and researched every senator and aide and dignitary she met with, and still she was reserved and distant and unimpressed.  
_Thank you, Moteé_. These seemed to be her only words to me. Always the same—if I handed her a missive for her signature or became her decoy so she could run to the arms of the secret lover we all knew she had but never talked about.  
The fierce young queen I had been so jealous of seemed to be nothing but a dream.

I was standing in as her decoy at a briefing on the Outer Rim Sieges when I met Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan.  
_So which one are you?_ he asked quietly as I straightened the papers of my dossier.  
_Senator?_ I asked in Amidala’s voice.  
The tall man smiled.  
_Amidala would not have known that particular detail of the Feluccian constitution. Nor would she have made that suggestion concerning the Perlemian Trade Route. Relations have always been, ah, strained between the Senator and the Trade Federation. So I ask again: which one are you?_  
_Moteé Batma_. I did not try to avoid his eye. I was tired of pretending.  
_It was a good idea, Moteé Batma, if a little unorthodox. I’ll take it to my constituents._

I was always invited to accompany Amidala to the Galactic Senate after that day. I sat beside Senator Organa and scribbled notes. Sometimes, he leaned over to whisper something about whoever was speaking and I would add it to my datapad, smiling.  
I briefed the Senator before each of her private meetings as well as her senate appearances. I found her mind to be remarkably keen and she drilled me mercilessly, sometimes asking questions that had no answer. We sat and debated labor laws or the Separatist movement until one or both of us conceded. It wasn’t until later I realized these arguments weren’t part of my duties. We were speaking as equals.

 

I began to be happy. But as I blossomed, the Senator seemed to fade. I heard her at night, sometimes. She cried out for someone she called Ani, and for a girl named Sabé. Once, I tried to comfort her, but Dormé hurried me out.  
She grew rounder and pinker, fairly glowing with health, but her eyes were pools of sadness. There came a time when not even Dormé could soothe her nightmares. She spoke sharply to those she had no patience for, no matter their station. I believe she even reprimanded Chancellor Palpatine on one occasion.  
_It’s all falling apart, isn’t it, Moteé_ , she said to me one day as we hurried to a last-minute hearing on the Senate Floor.  
_Perhaps, my lady,_ I replied. _But we’re clever enough to put it back together._

I was with her on the day it did fall to pieces. I sat behind her and watched as the Galactic Senate destroyed itself to the sound of thunderous applause.  
She, however, died quietly. Naboo’s grief was great, but here in the continuous hum of Coruscant, the center of the new Empire, the death of one brave but insignificant woman meant nothing. I did not walk beside her funeral boat with the other women who knew and loved her better. Instead, I sat in a starship bound for Alderaan and listened as Bail Organa and Mon Mothma of Chandrila offered me Amidala’s place in the Rebellion. There was only one answer to give. _Yes._

 

There is a mural on the ruins of the Jedi Temple here on Coruscant. I pass it every day on my way to the mockery that is now the Galactic Senate. It is quickly done, little more than graffiti. It is the portrait of a woman, dark-haired and unafraid. She cradles an orange flame in her hands. Among those in the Resistance, she is known as Liberty.

We were not friends, but I call her Padmé.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now, I realize that if you do any research into the Monarchy of Naboo, that Amidala's predecessor was someone named King Veruna but personally, I prefer that Naboo is always ruled by a queen....plus it fits with my previous chapter where Eirtae's great-grandmother was once Queen of Naboo so...I made stuff up.


	11. Umé

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> brief content warning for body horror/mental health struggles

If my father had not loved me, I would have been a Jedi.

When the tall man in the brown robes came, my mother was willing. There were so many of us; one less mouth to feed might have been a blessing. And I would not be mistreated; the man was very clear on that point. This was an honor. I was to become part of something greater, I would learn the mysteries of the universe and serve the highest cause—that was what he told my mother and father at our kitchen table.  
I was four and I sat in the doorway to listen while my eight brothers and sisters played in the canals a waterstone’s throw away. I watched my mother’s face carefully. (She did not hide her thoughts well.)  
_The future we offer your daughter is a very great one_ , said the man in the brown robes.  
I liked this man. He had kind eyes and huge hands.  
_I can take her with me today and she may begin her training with the Order as soon as tomorrow. She will be well-treated with us_.  
I watched my mother’s fingers drumming against the tabletop. I saw her calculating just how many credits she would be able to save if she let this man take me away. I saw her waver, the word _yes_ half-formed upon her lips. But my father spoke first.  
_No_.

So the man in the brown robes left, and I stayed behind.  
My father loved me, but it might have been better if he had not.

 

I was a strange child. I dreamed of the universe each night and woke believing I felt the galaxy swimming just beneath my skin. My sisters’ laughter gave me headaches and whenever we played tag in the canal behind our terrace, my brothers made me sit out. I was too fast to catch. I could smell rainstorms whole sunrises before they finally came to Theed. When I was eight, my brother Kori found a half-grown egret trapped in a ray-fish net. He and Prem hurled shells and stones while my other siblings cheered them on and I screamed my head off. My oldest sister Indré carried me home with blood seeping from my nose, still sobbing how I could feel the egret’s terror as the life-force drained out of it.  
My father held me all night, smoothing my fair hair away from my sticky face and humming tunelessly. I pressed myself close against his shoulder, smelling the sawdust that lingered in the rough fibers of his tunic.  
_Hush now, little Umé. It was a nightmare. You’re safe with me. You’re safe…_  
My father loved me. That should have been enough.

 

For a time, it was.  
My father used to help me with my homework. As a mason, he was a genius with mathematics and geometry. I had to concentrate hard to make those numbers and figures swim into focus. I hated the public lyceum with its bright lights and huge crowds of pupils. My migraines grew worse than ever. One evening when I was in the eighth form, I told my father over a flimsi of equations how it was as if the lecture hall was filled up with the whispers of every thought in every student’s head. How those whispers sometimes grew so loud I had to cover my ears while the girls seated on my left and right stared in disgust and embarrassment. How it felt sometimes as if there was a festering wound somewhere inside my head that never healed, try as I might to soothe the pain.  
He patted my hand and moved on the next equation, but not before I saw the look in his eyes.  
He understood then, how it might have been better if I’d gone away.

 

When I was fifteen, just a few months after the Day of Peace, I broke down at school. I still woke from nightmares of the labor camps—my family huddled together and all around me, the stink of fear and exhaustion and anger. All of that compressed into the small space between my ears; small wonder it didn’t happen sooner.  
I still don’t remember what exactly I did, only the relief that came after, and the sudden fear of my classmates. When I returned, they whispered cruel things and refused to come near.  
A few days later, my parents argued.  
_It would be good for her. She needs to be somewhere less crowded_ , my father was saying. _The lyceum was too much for her. Kori says the others don't even speak to her. She's all alone there._  
_It’s too expensive, Deven! Umé isn’t our only daughter. I have to think of the others._  
_The others? She isn’t anything like them!_  
_Well that’s true enough…such a hard little thing who never smiles. Always complaining about noise and speaking to things that aren’t there. You’ve spoiled her, Deven. Given her every little thing she wanted—_  
_Wanted? Umé wants nothing but peace and quiet!_  
_Then you should have listened to me! You should have let him take her!_ my mother screams.  
In the hall where I crouch to listen, I flinch. Truth hurts.  
_She is my child, Rani. With them, she would have been no one’s daughter. They would not have held her when she cried or celebrated her naming-day. They would not look at her and rejoice to see how tall she has grown, or how she shares their eyes and hands. They would not have loved her. I do._

That night, I dreamed I was a heron and my father was Tasia, the ice moon. I swam in the reflection of his cold light, and the world was silent.

 

The tutor my parents found for me was called Chella Taa’rek. She wore brown robes and a simple sand-colored shift. She was patient and kind and did what she could to help close the wound in my head.  
_Are you a Jedi?_ I asked when she arrived for our first lessons.  
_No_. Her voice was mild, but firm. _Let’s see how we get on with mathematics, then move to some writing exercises._  
Little by little, I learned about Chella Taa’rek. She was not a Jedi, but she had studied with the Order. Her path was that of a scholar, not a warrior. In her company, I grew more confident, more open, more myself. I laughed and smiled again. After we finished with schoolwork, she taught me breathing exercises to still the noise of the universe that raged in my head. She showed me how to live with the wound that would never close.  
It was Chella who brought me to Captain Typho.

 

I was twenty-two years old when I became a handmaiden to Senator Padmé Amidala.

The exam was easy for me. How could someone like me fail a blaster test? All it took was the tiniest nudge to guide the bolt home. And Chella Taa’rek had made me a passable scholar. My father hugged me hard on the day I left, weeping freely as he told me how proud he was. My mother kept her distance, as she always had.

By that time, I had learned enough to keep myself from falling over the edge, how to keep the ribbons of life and death and dark and light that wound endlessly through every organism from choking me. I still suffered from nightmares…that would never go away.  
We were in the Senator’s apartments on Coruscant when I woke screaming my throat raw. I had dreamed that I stood upon the still waters of the Sapphire Sea. The three moons were huge and full above me. Far away, there was another figure in robes of darkness. All at once, the sea began to tilt. The moons plunged downward as the ocean and all the creatures that swam within it began to rise. I pushed against the tide with all the strength I possessed, but I was crushed into nothing all the same.  
The Senator found me huddled in the sanistream. I must have seemed a wild animal to her for she approached me cautiously with her hands outstretched.  
_I miss it too_ , she whispered as she sat beside me on the hard tiles. Her nightgown clung to her as the water kissed her skin. I heard her heart beat in triplicate. _The water…_ _I miss it too. I grew up in the Lake Country. I swam every day until my lungs were so strong I could stay underwater for minutes. It was so peaceful, so beautiful…sometimes I didn’t want to come back up._  
_Sometimes I’m afraid I won’t be able to come back up_ , I whispered back. _There’s something wrong with me…I feel everything. Every little thing. It's too much...I think it will kill me..._  
I wonder what she really thought (the Senator was very good at disguising her emotions) when I turned my eyes on her then. I was a mad girl with the universe trying to get out of me, all soaking hair and bruised eyes and sharp elbows. She should have spoken to Captain Typho…had me discreetly dismissed and removed…I was a clearly a liability, unable to fulfill my duties…she might even have sent me to a medcenter in the Lake Country where I could live comfortably with my madness; far enough away to be a nuisance to no one.  
Instead, she smiled and wiped away my tears. She put her arms around me and whispered that everything would be fine. She told me that feeling so deeply was a gift. That it was what made me human. It taught me how to be compassionate. Selfless. Traits she admired greatly. She told me not to be afraid, for I was not alone. She was beside me.  
We sat together under the water for a long time.

 

I tell myself that if I had been a Jedi, I could have saved her.  
I would have fought him to the end. But then, perhaps I would have ended the same way he did.  
He loved her, the one they once called _Skywalker_. I could smell it on him whenever he was near. The air changed when they stood together, it whispered to me of blissful secrets. The Jedi are not to form personal attachments; this was what Chella Taa’rek had told me once. They are taught to love all life equally, as the Force loves all life equally. Weak-minded sentients might love individually, but the Jedi are greater; their calling is higher.  
It was easy to see why he loved her…why he chose her…why it was so easy for him to turn the universe on its head. She was kind where so many others had been cruel. She loved the water. Her hands were gentle. Her voice was strong. She listened as I spoke about my nightmares and the horrors of being touched by the Force. She did not send me from her side.  
I tell myself I could have saved her, even if it would have torn me apart. Surely, that would have been less agonizing than feeling every atom of what had once been Padmé Amidala being washed away, like the canal waters through a drain.

I would have broken the galaxy for her too. I loved her too much, just as he did.

I learned it from my father.


	12. Miré

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> brief content warning for some death and war-related suffering

What I remember most is the smell. The smell and the hunger. It returns to me in nightmares. Even now, as an old woman with rheumy eyes and joints that creak and ache when squalls move in from the Sapphire Sea, the stench of those days can wake me, weeping, from the deepest slumber. There is no forgetting. But in the remembering, there is some relief…

My father was an officer in the Royal Naboo Security Forces. He smelled of boot-black and _kaffe._ He left early and came home late, but he was never too tired to play. My mother was a journalist; quite a famous one. Her articles and interviews on such subjects as the illegal water-trade and the organization of labor unions were once taught at the Royal University of Naboo. No more. The name _Bindi Zeev_ has been struck from history, with so many others.  
We lived in Vis—my mother, my father, and I—in an airy villa with tall windows that always stood open to catch the breeze off the lake. The parquet floors were bright with wax and sunlight; I used to lay in the wide hallways with a flimsy-pad and try to draw the light streaming through the sheer curtains. I was always drawing—on walls, napkins, my own skin. When it came time for my evening bath, my mother would smile and shake her head as she gently washed the stick figures and simple flowers from my knees and forearms.  
_My Miré_ , she said to me once. _You look so like your father, but there is something of me in you too, little scribbler.  
_ She pulled back her silk sleeve to show me smudged writing on the inside of her arm. I smiled so wide I thought my face would split open. My mother laughed and sponged a star-flower from my ankle.  
_Sometimes, there’s nowhere else to write…_

 

These are happy memories of a happy time. There are others; many others. The birth of my baby brother Yishai, the little green songbird my father brought home one evening, a kiss with a local boy during the Festival of Life, small dramas and adventures with my schoolmates…but you are not interested in these. You want to know of the dark days; you are anxious to hear of the moment when it all changed. Well then, let us get on with it.

 

Looking back, what shocked me the most was that it happened in the morning. When you are small, you believe that terrible things only come at night. Monsters that loom in the darkness of the small hours disappear with the rising sun. This is, of course, folly; but we do not become wise to this knowledge until we are grown. I was just fifteen when the droid army of the Trade Federation turned their blasters and missiles on the sleepy lake town where I had grown up. After the transmitter was destroyed, they turned on the security forces. I read later (many years later) that it was handled expertly and executed with military precision; that Vis was seized with minimal casualties. The first lesson my mother taught me was to never believe what you read. Allow me to set the record straight. The entire force of the Royal Naboo Security Forces stationed on Vis was decimated within five minutes. Their bodies were left where they fell for the carrion-birds of the swampland, tangled and broken. One of these was Captain Jethro Zeev, my father.

The security station was seized at exactly 0900 hours, Galactic Standard Time. I was washing my face when the tile floor shook beneath my bare feet; when my father was being blown apart.  
_Miré,_ my mother shouted to me from the bottom of our scrolling staircase. _Put on travelling clothes and your leather boots. Put blankets and soap and spare clothes in a pack and come down here in five minutes ready to leave this house.  
_ If it had been anyone but my mother saying this, I might have scoffed and gone back to the mirror. But my mother was no stranger to war and conflict. It was her job to bear witness and to tell the truth.

 

We had no chance.  
They were everywhere—battle droids with blasters and kill orders programmed into their hard drives. Those who tried to fight or to flee were shot. I watched my friend Rupi and her family mowed down after her father stole a blaster rifle in an effort to escape. Her long black hair splashed like dark water where she fell on the red stones of the city square.  
_Don’t look, Miré_ , my mother breathed in my ear.  
But there was nowhere else to turn my eyes. Rupi’s blood pooled…a woman in blue robes lay dead beside the fountain while her tiny son screamed beside her…an old man was shot because he could not keep up with the droids’ marching…  
We left the dead curled like seashells behind us; a monstrous trail of terrible bread crumbs. Yishai cried in my mother’s arms. The sound was small and frail and heartbreaking.

 

And so we come to Penladen.  
What can I say of that place to make you understand? You do not know the stench of piss and sickness and misery and starvation. It is impossible to ignore or blot out. You must simply learn to live with it. B1 battle droids are programmed for war. They know nothing of humanity or what it takes to maintain a lifeform. There was no food but what we had brought with us. We ate straw and beetles when that was gone. I lay awake at night, listening to the groans and coughing that leaked through the shoddy walls of the barracks and counted my ribs. If it had happened in the winter months, we might have all froze to death. But warm weather brings its own kind of curse. We had been at the detention camp almost a week when the sickness began. It spread as if on wings, like a heron, from bunk to bunk, mother to child, old to young. It started with fever and ended two days later in cold death. There was no ground to bury the bodies, so closely were we packed together. The men who were strong enough wrapped their hands and faces in cloth and stacked them along the stone walls. My mother fought another woman for the precious bar of soap I had carried with me from our sunlit villa. The woman carried scars under her right eye for the rest of her life.

And yet…

Through it all, the sickness and the death and the terrible, terrible hunger, there was hope. The security forces who had escaped New Centrif and Theed had banded together to form a secret resistance. From time to time, we would awaken to loaves of bread and sometimes fruit littering the ground where they had been tossed over the walls that kept us penned like animals. Sometimes, new prisoners would be admitted with food and medicines hidden in their robes and stuffed into boots. These prisoners passed silently from barrack to barrack, bringing news of the outside world. Sometimes there were people who came carrying crates stamped with the emblem of the Trade Federation. But as soon as the droids had been sent on some errand or another, these crates were opened to reveal warm clothes and bottles of water. And after these things were unloaded, small children were bundled up and secreted away inside those crates and carried to safety. They took Yishai on the sixteenth day of captivity. He was too hungry and weak to cry as the lid was nailed shut. My mother leaned on my arm as we watched his box carried through the heavy gates and away from us to freedom.  
Two days later, my mother was dead.

 

These are the things you wished to know, yes? These are the things they do not print in the accounts of the Blockade Days. The things that no one can tell you except for those who lived it.

 

Through it all, I drew. The pages of my flimsy-pad were soon used up and just as when I was a child, I turned to walls, fabric, my skin. I painted with charcoal, with dust mixed in spit, a stick in the dirt. I drew my mother dying in the sunlight, my brother curled inside a weapons crate, Rupi’s long hair spilling against stone, the boy who sang watersongs for his coughing grandfather, the piles of the dead, the girl not much older than I who came with medicine hidden in a leather pouch, the starving girl with mad black eyes who shrieked at things that weren’t there. I drew it all; captured it perfectly so that it might never be forgotten.  
(I showed her once, the Senator Amidala of Naboo. I showed her what she had saved her people from. It was many days before she found the courage to meet my eyes again. _It wasn’t enough,_ was all she could say. _I didn’t do enough._ )

 

Liberation came in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth day. My cloak hung limp about me, and my ribcage poked through my shift. I stayed long enough to watch my mother’s body burned. On the transport to Theed, I wept when a man in a green flight suit handed me a bowl of onion and broth. I wept again when my brother Yishai was passed into my arms—all pink and sun-gold and laughing and whole. Again on the Day of Peace when the young queen welcomed her people into the Palace. The world smelled of fresh water and waterlilies and freedom. I recognized one of the green-cloaked girls who stood behind the queen. She was the one who came to Penladen with the medicine in her bag. I touched my fingers to my lips and held them out to her. She did not see; she was watching the queen.

 

Most of what you are interested in ends here, but I will finish the tale for you as best I can. Yishai grew up to become an astrophysicist. He was arrested on several occasions for refusing a contract with the Empire. Eventually, he escaped and joined the Resistance. I became, as you know, something of a great artist. I spent three years as a handmaid to the Senator Padmé Amidala of Naboo. I wish I’d had the chance to know her better. Like so many I have known, she died much too young. I painted her portrait, you know. It hung in the Senate for a time. I don’t know what became of it, after. Surely it was destroyed. More’s the pity. It was a very good likeness…

Much of what I painted was never displayed. The Empire deemed it too inflammatory. This was a compliment, my mother would have told me. It meant I was telling the truth. Most of my most important works were small, silly things sent to a base on Yavin that would have meant nothing to anyone who did not know to soak the parchment in citron juice before holding it up to a bright light. Still others were painted across my thighs and stomach, smuggled onto Coruscant and Corellia and Alderaan under the guise of a commissioned portrait for some high-ranking official. These were wiped away upon delivery, burned upon translation. They will never hang in a gallery beside those pieces that have made me famous. But it is these I am most proud of. It was these I found most beautiful.

You see, it is my mother’s spirit at work in me. And my father’s…my friend Rupi’s…Padmé Amidala’s. They urge me on.

To hope where there is none. To help where I can. To remember. To tell the truth. To resist.

 

 

_This is a part of an interview with the late Miré Zeev, the great portrait artist and native of Planet Naboo. The interview was conducted and published by Aviel Wati as part of a commemorative project, marking seventy years since the liberation and destruction of the Penladen detention camp._

_The interview, in its entirety, is preserved in the Naboo Royal Library, along with several of Miré Zeev’s oil paintings and her sketchbook of Penladen, a gift to the Library from her son Karta._


	13. Versé

26 Kelona, BBY 23

_A new journal for my naming-day! It’s certainly the most beautiful journal I’ve ever had. Papa bought it from a leather-worker in the Market of Theed. It’s soft and smells divine and every beautiful page is just waiting for me to scribble all over it! I only hope I’ll be able to find the time. I’ve just been accepted into the training program. Mother wants me to stay home and take the teaching position the Royal Primary School offered to me, but everyone in Naboo knows that serving the Queen is the highest honor granted to a girl my age. The acceptance transmission from Captain Typho says I won’t be working for Queen Jamillia…don’t look enough like her, I suppose! But the Senator Amidala has need of bodyguards.  
I don’t mind at all. This new queen of ours has yet to prove herself, but everyone on Naboo knows what Amidala is made of. Saltwater and hurricane winds, Papa says!_

30 Kelona, BBY 23

_Just a few minutes until arrival at Training Base. Not much time for writing. I’m nervous. Excited too, of course, but mostly nervous. What if I’m nothing but a spectacular failure? If I look out the window of this speeder, I can see the dormitories and the training pitch. Looks rather forbidding. Oh, we’re about to land. If I write again, it means I’ve survived my first day!_

2 Selona, BBY 23

_Everything hurts. Can barely find the strength to keep my fingers curled around this stylus. Suddenly, staying in Theed and teaching arithmetic to small children sounds heavenly._

4 Selona, BBY 23

 _This handmaiden training is no laughing matter. I suppose it can’t be, as we’re the last defense between Amidala and death. If I’ve learned nothing else this week, it’s that my life is expendable and hers is not. I haven’t had the time to sit down and think about that, but it occurs to me now that this principle is a bit hard to swallow. If it came right down to it, I wonder if I really would sacrifice myself for this woman I’ve still not met, but know so much about. Who is she to demand my loyalty this way…to ask for my life?_  
_And what am I, Versé Tylish, to her? Does she know how I was born two months too early, sickly and small, and that my mother wept when I was at last placed in her arms? Or how I love to read? And if I were to die, could this Senator stand before my mother, who suffered three more miscarriages before finally accepting I was to be her only child, her best beloved? Could she stand there, drawing breath and gloriously alive, and thank them for my service, thank them for my sacrifice?_  
_Oh, I won’t think of this now…I’m too tired and sore. Training is wretched, but miracle of miracles, I’m not a spectacular failure! Blaster practice is the most fun, and my aim is much improved. It’s weight-training that makes me wish I’d taken the position at the primary school. There’s also hand-to-hand combat, speed and agility, flight simulation, and comportment and elocution lessons. Apparently, we must be ladies as well as deadly warriors._

10 Selona, BBY 23

_I look at myself in the mirror and I hardly recognize myself these days. I am so strong! And so fast! I would win any footrace with those terrible boys who grew up next door. My face is grown quite brown from the time spent outside, and I even seem to stand taller.  It’s those terrible comportment lessons coming to fruition…curse them!_

25 Selona, BBY 23

_Cordé says that tomorrow the Senator arrives to meet us. More like ‘inspect’ us, I joked back, but I rather fear it’s true. I wonder what she’ll be like. In the holoreels, she always looks so cold and distant. Papa would remind me, ‘people can surprise you’ but I think I shall practice my curtsy, just in case._

26 Selona, BBY 23

 _Well, for better or worse, I fear that Senator Amidala will not soon be forgetting the name, Versé Tylish. I guessed correctly; today was more of an inspection than a social call. Amidala arrived halfway through our morning drills. I was on the agility course, so I wasn’t presented until after I emerged, covered in sweat and grime (and having just set a new record, might I just add!). But I fear that wasn’t the worst of it…oh no! That was yet to come._  
_It was during my interview. Everything started off wonderfully. She asked about my time here, skimmed through my file, the word ‘impressive’ was thrown about, and then…_  
_Oh why did I do it? I suppose I just wanted to see what was underneath that porcelain exterior; to see if I could crack it. It comes with a background in education. I just wanted to get the measure of this woman with the solemn face; to see if we were of a kind._  
_“Do you love us, Senator? As we are taught love you; without thought of ourselves?”_  
_She said nothing, but those gray eyes so like mirrors widened, and something like surprise and perhaps fury flickered across her face._  
_For a moment, I thought she would not answer me. I saw Captain Typho lean over, ready to dismiss me. I hurried to obey, shocked and ashamed that I had dared speak so rudely. Then…_  
_“Yes. Sometimes.”_  
_I found I could not look at Captain Typho, tense and angry as a thundercloud._  
_“Yet we must love you always. Enough to die, even.”_  
_“Yes.”_  
_Her voice was level and assured, but there was something like sympathy and a veritable ocean of conflicting emotion in her eyes._  
_“And your life is worthy of this devotion?”_  
_“I try to make it be so. Always, I try to make it be so.”_  
_I left then, before Captain Typho could give me the sack. I’ve spent all evening waiting to be called into his office…waiting to be told to pack my things and return to Theed. But it is late into the night now, and I am still here…still thinking of those thousand thoughts I saw passing behind Amidala’s gray eyes…_

 

4 Telona, BBY 23

_Wonder of wonders! Miracle of miracles! I’ve been accepted as handmaiden to Senator Padmé Amidala. I leave this tiny, cold dormitory with all its drafts and sore, sleepless nights tomorrow with the sunrise. Off to send a holo to Mother and Papa and then, time to pack!_

_P.S. I suppose sometimes it does pay to muddy the waters, as Papa says!_

((many of the middle entries of Versé Tylish’s diary are lost or damaged beyond repair…what remains and is intelligible is collected below…))

 

15 Helona, BBY 23

_Senate sessions all day today…that’s eight long hours of sitting like a statue listening to them go on and on about the Separatist Crisis. Not that the Separatist Crisis isn’t important…I’m sure it is. I’m also quite sure I don’t completely understand what the crisis exactly encompasses, and why it’s a crisis. I didn’t have time to do much preparatory research. Captain Typho would kill me if he knew… Oh son of a bantha, Cordé is calling for me. Must be time to leave._

3 Melona, BBY 23

 _Amidala has asked me to teach her to play shatranj. I was playing against myself with the set Papa carved for me when I was small, and she sat down to watch. I could tell she was curious, for her solemn gray eyes never left the little pieces, trying to puzzle out their complicated movements._  
_“It is a game of strategy and cunning, my lady, I explained. Always, you must consider your own move as well as your opponents. But even more than that, you must always think of what move each of you will make after.”_  
_“Useful for one in such a position as I, don’t you think, Versé?”_  
_"Ah, but my lady, I feel you are already considering another, bolder move.”_  
_She laughed once and nodded. “Teach me,” she said. Then she smiled. “Please.”_  
_I like this Senator more and more every day._

 

17 Welona, BBY 23

 _It has been so long now since I asked that silly question of her, but I doubt I will ever forget the answer she gave. It seems the Senator spoke true. There are those of us handmaidens whom she loves._  
_Her name is Sabé. She is tall and thin as a fishbone. Amidala turns into a living, laughing girl when she is near. Apparently, Sabé is a pilot in the Naboo Royal Airforce. She is not here for long; from what Cordé and I can piece together she is on furlough. Dormé says she was one who fought with Amidala in the days of the Blockade, that she was Amidala’s decoy. We’ve been dying to know more, but all Dormé says is that the Senator holds this Sabé close to her heart._  
_That much is clear. The Senator is softer in this woman’s presence. More human…she hums as she sits at her desk, poring over treatises…she smiles (it is a smile that makes you think of rain in springtime—soft and bearing the promise of new life). Just yesterday, Amidala pressed my hand as I helped her step into her senatorial gown (beautiful to be sure, but horribly restricting and heavier than all five volumes of the Trade Regulation handbooks.)_  
_“Thank you Versé,” she said._  
_She said it for buttoning up a gown, but I think she meant it for everything else, too. For being here with her. For the pledge I gave upon my selection. For the life that should be my own, but instead is given over to her. For doing all this without complaining._  
_I fear my answer was not enough…It is nothing, my lady…that is what I said. But I meant it._

11 Kelona, BBY 22

_Tomorrow we are returning to Coruscant for the vote. Captain Typho has been trying for weeks to talk Amidala out of (what he calls) this foolishness. Predictably, it has all been to no avail. Any of her handmaidens could have told the Captain that changing Amidala’s mind once it has been set is like trying to turn back the tide. So to Coruscant we go. Cordé will be decoy, and I will be handmaiden. I’m sure there’s little to fear. I should like to find a new shatranj set to send home to Papa and something beautiful for Mother. She never asks for anything when I travel with the Senator. She says she only prays for my safe return.  
I tell her it is the Senator who needs her prayers; I only follow where she leads._

((This diary was found in the wreckage of the ship carrying the decoy and personal guard of Senator Padmé Amidala to the Coruscant Landing Field for an important vote regarding the Separatist Crisis. It was donated to the Naboo Royal Library after the passing of her parents, where it is preserved as an important first-hand account regarding the life of the great Padmé Naberrie, late Senator and former Queen of Naboo.))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Shatranj' is the ancient Persian word for 'chess.'


	14. Padmé

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coda

The last part of the story is mine, for I too was a handmaiden.

They called me a great woman, a leader, a queen; but the truth is this. I was only ever a girl. Foolish and striving, convinced that I was strong enough to carry worlds upon my shoulders and capable of taking a galaxy’s pain into my own small heart only to birth it again, green and growing and full of hope. If…if…I am more than this, it is because of them.

 

On my planet, there are many sayings. When I was very small, I woke screaming from a nightmare. I had seen my death—fire and whiteness and a terrible choking love. I sat weeping in the moonlight, listening to the blood pounding through my heart; proof that I was alive. My father came in to hold me and he whispered to me that the Naboo have long believed that we die two deaths. One only comes to stop our hearts; the other, more final, does not come until our name is spoken for the last time. Perhaps that was the beginning of all that my life was to become—a simple, selfish attempt to taste eternal life. I did warn you; I was only ever a girl.

They wrote my name in books. Every year, I feel a tugging beneath my ribs as schoolchildren stumble over _Amidala_. Very occasionally, a university student will whisper my name as they stumble upon an ancient dissertation from my days in the Legislative Youth Program. Sometimes the name echoes in the halls of the Palace. I close my eyes and I remember us running there, laughing even as we slip and fall upon the slick marble floor.

I see them all. I walk beside them.

I am the blue veil that Ellé Sun wears as she brings children into the world. I kiss her cheek and thank her for mine. I am captured in resplendent glory by Miré Zeev. The painting is never officially found, but it was never destroyed by the Empire either.  I am in every step that Motée Batma takes, and though we were not friends, the thought makes me proud. I live in the fever-dreams of Umé Kala; she smiles to feel my hand upon her burning forehead. I am the watersong that Dormé Luta sings to my daughter, smoothing the dark hair behind tiny rosebud ears. The child will never know my name. Dormé will keep that secret until the end, but Leia will be rocked to sleep by the same music my mother sang to me. I am the candle flames flickering beside the memorial stones of those who have followed me into the darkness. _Cordé, Versé, Teckla Minnau._

I suppose I am in him too…though I try not to think of this. I know he tries not to think of me. His heart is closed to me. He gave me that heart once, and I held it tenderly. I wanted to heal him; to kiss away the burning places left by the desert and the anger and the wanting what could not be. I should have known better, but I was a girl in love. I would not have listened anyway. He used to whisper, sing, shout my name, and I would answer, laughing, with his. Now, my name is pulled from his ruined lips only in sleep. On those nights, I keep watch. It is all I can do. I am the shadow upon the sterile white walls, and when he wakes, he never knows that I was there at all.

In truth, I gave my love away before I ever knew his face. I gave it to five girls. One was fair and proud. I am her granddaughter, Luna Padmé Silva, born on the day my son forgave his father. One was quiet and generous. I am in the eyes of every poor soul she works to save. Another was fierce. I was the waterstone necklace upon her breast and the rope around her neck. I held her as she died. Another was beautiful and full of poetry. I am the stories she tells her children in the silvery language of our people. The last was tall and slender with a hunger in her eyes that never really went away. I loved her more than I ever let myself reveal. She was the hollow space between my ribs, and her hand fit perfectly in mine. I was the Alliance flame painted on her Starfighter. I was the stolen kiss upon her lips. I was there to gather her to me when the end came. I was there to place her among the stars.

 

So many of them have died their first death. Only a few remain to remember the girl I always was. Soon they too will join their sisters and my name will fade a little more from history.

But it _will_ go on. And so, in a way, will theirs. I am in them and they are in me. Our histories are forever bound; queens and handmaidens, handmaidens and queens. There will never be one without the other. After me will come another, and another, and another again.

For we all must die.

But we live forever in the people we love.


End file.
